Traditional Instinctive Archery in Malta

Adventure. Learning a new skill. Getting out of your comfort zone. That’s everything and more that you will do with me on this little photo blog of mine. This time we will learn about archery and it’s going to be great fun!

Here we are at the archery range in Lija. We are all beginners and none of us have done this before. We booked a group session with Danny for the 6 of us. One session lasts 1h30min and costs 15eur per person. We will be learning/practicing the traditional instinctive archery. The instructor will teach us how to shoot a bow as in ancient times.

Danny has 40 years’ experience in archery, more than 20 years teaching archery, 7 years teaching archery in Malta.

How does traditional instinctive archery work? We don’t aim, we simple look at the target and shoot at it. How do you manage to hit the target without aiming properly you may ask. Well, I’m going to tell you don’t worry.

Stand sideways to your target, your feet shoulder apart and your knees are relaxed. Pick up the bow and hold it in your left hand down by your side. Then you take your first arrow, slide it through the bow and hold it on this piece of plastic and clip it right under a small piece of metal on the string. You will put one finger above the arrow and two fingers below the arrow. Holding it on the last line of your fingers.

Look at your target, the bow is at a position of 1 o’ clock. Relax your elbow and relax your shoulder. If your arm is too stiff, when you release the string, it will hit you on the inner side of you hand. Pull your right elbow back with the string until your middle finger reaches the corner of your mouth. Shoot.

Now it’s time for some practice. We all have three arrows. When everyone is ready with all three, we wait for Danny to say safety, so we can go and pick up our arrows from the range without risking of being injured. And like this we keep on going, practising, and improving our archery skills.

First, we started by shooting at hay blocks. Then Danny added some soft toys hanging from these hay blocks making it rather challenging, but so much fun! We finished our session with zombie apocalypse!

Malta Archery also offers Combat Archery, which is a cool team building activity. It is a fun, high energy activity when you’re split into teams, and you play variety of games in which you shoot each other with bows and safety arrows.

It was great fun learning something new and spending quality time with friends. We will surely be back as next time we would like to try knife and axe throwing, which they also offer!